Category: Interview

Team scaling, 1 trillion emails, and the synthesis of people and strategy with Pattie Money, CPO at SendGrid You’ve almost certainly received a SendGrid email, and you probably didn’t even know it. If you’ve ever gotten an Uber receipt, an Airbnb welcome note, or an eBay password reset, you can thank SendGrid. In the past few years, SendGrid has gone from a small tech startup to one of the most prominent companies in its space, with over 35 billion emails sent per month. In fact, on March 27th, they celebrated their trillionth email send. Naturally, we were excited to speak with Pattie Money, SendGrid’s Chief People Officer to discuss what goes on behind the scenes at the cloud-based email service.[…]

Yesware is not a company concerned with just talent acquisition. They are a company whose focus is talent as a whole. Monthly massages. Uber compensation. Gym membership. Professional coaching. Perhaps the reason employees at Yesware seem dedicated to helping their team is because their team seems dedicated to helping them. Their company page lists some extensive and creative benefits, including unlimited vacation policies, daily catered lunch, weekly exercise classes, and dinner and an Uber home if an employee works late. We want you to be your best self, the company website says in large font above a list of some of their benefits. A holistic approach to talent Yesware is sales acceleration SaaS company based out of Boston, MA.[…]

A company, divided… in a good way. Everwise is a company built on two coasts. After selling their last company, Audium, to Cisco in 2006, Mike Bergelson and Colin Schiller, decided to try their hand at another big problem: career development. In 2012 they started building Everwise, the talent development company that helps customers like MasterCard, Oracle, Sony, and Salesforce develop and retain their valuable workforce. And they’ve built it from New York and San Francisco. Now at 100 employees, the business-side of Everwise resides in San Francisco, while product and development are based in Manhattan. From the start this 2,910 mile divide meant that Everwise had to be an organization built on maturity and collaboration — traits that carry[…]

Big Cartel – a big family with a mission The mission statement that headlines Big Cartel’s career page is concise: “We help artists make a living doing what they love” The company is dedicated to giving artists successful ecommerce outlets by letting artists set up their own online shops to sell their work. Big Cartel arms its clients – a wide community of over a million artists and creators – with robust retail tools and sleek website design capabilities to create their unique digital space. Part of what makes the company so successful, and compelling, is the creative, individualistic culture that reflects the community they serve. The crossroads of culture & community Richard Laing joined Big Cartel in 2015 as Director of Community,[…]

Creativity, diversity & inclusion – the key ingredients to Patreon’s success Patreon has helped creators and artists earn more than $100 million – and it was only started in 2013. The secret? Patreon is a company comprised of passionate, creative people. They’re a team dedicated to funding the emerging creative class, because they are the creative class. As a company, they’re also deeply committed to core behaviors, values and inclusivity. By creators, for creators Patreon helps creators earn a sustainable income, and make a living from their work without having to be a mass-marketed, commercially-known artist. Artists and creators, however, aren’t just Patreon’s clients, they make up the Patreon team itself. Almost everyone working there has an artistic hobby. Daily jam sessions are quite[…]

People, process and preparing to scale In the beginning of 2016, Branch was at a team-building crossroads: The deep-linking platform for the world’s top brands had to hit lofty hiring goals in order to support their growing list of 10,000+ customers (including Drafted). They needed to scale from 40 teammates to 90, they were relying heavily on staffing agencies to fill open jobs, and they were about to hire an in-office talent acquisition team to reduce their agency dependency and transform hiring. It was at this time that Monica Cuyong joined Branch as a technical recruiter and team lead. Along with her teammate Viviana De La Torre, they would find alternative sources of qualified candidates and scale the team by 50[…]

Preparing for lift-off In October 2015, Segment, the San Francisco-based the customer data platform, was at an inflection point: They had just raised $27M in Series B fundraising from some of tech’s biggest VC funds, had hit the 50 person mark, and they needed to double in size to support their growth goals. The founding team, including CEO Peter Reinhardt, had made it this far — from MIT to Y Combinator to traction and initial growth — but they realized that they needed to bring on a Human Resources leader to handle the steep growth curve they were about to hit. As timing would have it, long-time HR and Recruiting expert, Adriana Roche was looking for new growth opportunities in[…]